00:00:08 Speaker 1: From Media Doors World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can review with Ryan kel Kelly. Now here's Kel. Did you know that there have been eleven human children born in Antarctica? At Murdo Station, Antarctica, temperatures are rarely above thirty eight degrees in the summer and rarely go below negative thirty three in the winter. However, the coldest recorded temperature was July three at Bostok Station, where attempts plunged to a hundred and twenty eight point six degrees below zero. Although there are year round residents here that include people, penguins, and seals, the largest native terrestrial animal is only about a quarter inch long. It's called Belgica Antarctica and it's a wingless midge. Don't just call this thing a bug as Belgica Antarctica is an extreme o file that means something that lives in extreme environments. If it were to live in conditions a bit more hospitable, a place that doesn't get too hot or too cold, say, you could call it a meso file, which is a critter that lives in environment to uh D and fifteen degrees or let's say critter lakes an environment with a pH level that is neutral, that'd be a neutro file. Now, if you're a fly fisherman, you might know Belgica Antarctica as a chronomd as in Hey, we've been catching a lot of rainbows on chronomid patterns. The ace nous and snow nous of this particular chronamid's chosen locale brings to mind one of the more popular chronomid fly tying patterns, the snow cone. This week we've got what it takes to graduate in the Philippines, toilet weasels, poachers, wooly mammas, wilderness and more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. I took the weekend to dial in my hovel. I got a place here in Bozeman, Montana a few months back, and it felt like a squatter in it for a while. I got a few European mounts up on the wall. A European mount or euromount if you aren't hip to that one is a skull that has had the flesh either eaten off by domestic beetles, or the flesh is boiled off by spending several hours in a pot Either way, all that is left is a clean skull. You can then set the clean skull on a shelf or bookcase or a wall or something. Not a huge hang stuff up guy, even when it comes to quote trophies. But I'll admit the place looks class here and there's some strong memories attached to them. One of these skull induced memories comes from a British Columbia moose. I got stuck waist deep in the glacial silt of a river with a hundred plus pounds of moose meat on my back. Had made a poor choice of choosing to shoot the moose on an island in a river, which, as it turned out, was very deep and unwaitable. That story goes on for a while. Also put up a couple of mule here that honestly mean a whole lot more for reasons I may go into later. Not the most important thing I got done at the new places I got some earth boxes planted, which are neat little tupperware type setups full of soil that make growing food possible for a bachelor guy on the move like myself. The other highlight is I got to take my three year old nephew fishing along with a small herd of other children. Quite proud to report that as the kids slowly started to lose interest in fishing and gain more interest and less important forms of play, my three year old nephew stayed focused and fished longer than three five of his peers. The three year old made it as long as the nine year old, and the nine year old is, as I would say, a real fishy dude. Moving on, the Philippines, an island country consisting of islands and islets that make up more than uh thousand, five hundred and fifty miles of coastline, was once heavily forested. However, the total forest cover has dropped from sev in the twentieth century. Logging, mining, illegal logging, climate change, general habitat destruction are the culprits here. However, a new Filipino law aims to make a change. The new law requires all graduating high school and college students to plant at least ten trees each before they can graduate. If adhered to, over the course of one generation, five hundred and twenty five billion trees would be planted. Even if ten percent survived, that will be an additional five hundred five million trees. I think I built a four weight fly rod for my senior project, which I had no cause to second gas or rethink until now. Moving on to our most recent Lazarus species discovery. For those of you slow to the game, Lazarus as an old boy from the Bible who was raised from the dead. So the Lazarus species is a species thought to be extinct that returns from the dead by being discovered to have not actually gone extinct. Think blackfooted ferrets, the Lord how Walking Stick, and the Sela camp I'd be negligent here not to plug Nick Cave's album Dig Lazarus Dig, So keep that in mind once you've listened to every last single episode of this show and there's nothing more for you to do anyways. A self described amateur naturalist in Columbia has managed to capture the first ever picture of a living Colombian weasel. Looks not dissimilar to our short tailed weasel here in the US, except this weasel has shaggy your hair and a bit of a soul patch of brown fur on its tan chest. It's about eight and a half inches long and can weigh as much as five ounces from nose to tail. This species was thought by some to be extinct due to the fact that there hasn't been a sighting for at least a century. The species is only known from four total specimens, and these new pictures from our amateur naturalist are the only photographic evidence in existence. The Columbian weasel was known to inhabit dense jungle riparian zones, but this weasel managed to get his picture taken on of all places, a toilet seat. When our amateur naturalist or citizens scientist began to identify the weasel in his pictures, he stumbled upon a picture of the Columbian weasel and thought, quote, could this be my toilet weasel? Something to keep in mind next time you walk in on our squad on interesting critter in their natural setting or your natural setting. Jumping over to our law enforcement desk, Montana man was recently sentenced to five hundred hours of community service for a wildlife conservation organization which I like, ten years of probation, thirty three thousand fifty bucks and restitution, as well as forfeiture of hunting, fishing, and trapping rights for life. What did he do to get all that? In two thousand seventeen. The poacher killed and for the most part wasted, a six by four over your buck, five by six bull elk, a six by six bull elk with a broken seventh time, a six by six bull elk with a drop brow time, two antelope, and two turkeys. When investigators showed up to the poacher's home after receiving an anonymous tip, they witnessed the man running out the back door with an armload of animal skulls. The poacher pled guilty. I have to say I like the fine, I love the community service, but the first lie he broke was not having a license or tags to begin with, all the while enjoying the practices. I think that a good deal for him now is that he should buy the necessary licenses while not enjoying the activities and the other law enforcement news guy known as Booster Gary walks into a BLM museum and anchorage and walks out with a ten thousand year old, five foot long mammoth tusk. After arrest and conviction, he was sentenced to thirty three months in federal prison. After serving that sentence in full, he will be on supervised release for three years and will not be permitted to visit National Park, National Forests or BLM land without the permission of his probation officer. Apparently, Booster Gary an accomplice, walked in the day before committing the crime and asked BLM Museum staff specific questions about the weight and authenticity of the mammoth tusk. Then they came back after hours, broke a window, and slowly made off with what I assume was a heavy hall. They then proceeded to cut the tusk up, presumably to sell the folks that made jewelry or art of some sort, and sold it off. BLM officials called it an irreplaceable paleontological resource. Mammoth are fairly rare, obviously, as the animals have been absent from most everywhere since they went extinct over ten thousand years ago, But there was one population of mammoths located on Wrangel Island, an island off the coast of far eastern Siberia that lived in an additional six thousand years longer than mainland specimens. The Wrangel Island mammoth population didn't go extinct until six fifty b C. That means the wooly mammoth, a critter that would resemble a shaggy African elephant with much smaller ears. You know, because big ears on elephants helped dissipate heat. Heat being a commodity of mammoth wanted to keep so now you know that anyway, the wooly mammoth was still walking when humans were constructing a half mile long wooden bridge over Lake Zurich in Switzerland, and the Greek letter pie had started chowing up on mathematicians. Papyrrah scrolls to milk this mammoth story a bit more. A booster, as in booster Gary in this case, could be a person who is a promoter of a show or a concert or a boxing match. Or a booster could be a person who specializes in selling stolen goods and likely does a bit of stealing themselves. Booster Gary is from Wasilla, you know that town where Sarah Palin was a mayor. Was Scilla has a population of about eleven thousand people. Coming from a relatively small community myself and spending lots of time in small community since then, they're likely wasn't much debate on what type of booster Gary was, nor would there have been much speculation as to what booster Gary had in mind for that mammoth tusk, especially when you take into consideration that Booster Gary had been offering his boosting services through social media. So if you happen to have a job at a museum that happens to have large fossil laying about, and you just happen to have some folks that look a bit questionable enquiring about the general packability of those fossils, you may want to remember this story and over exaggerate the weight and under exaggerate the value of said fossils. Now we're gonna stick with paleontology for another quick one. Then we're gonna head over to the politics desk, where I may rant for a bit. A fifty million year old slab of rock from part of the Green River Formation in Wyoming somehow made it to a museum in Katsuyama in Japan, where it was recently rediscovered by a biologist on vacation from Arizona State University. The twenty two inch wide rock features a fossilized school or shoal of two and fifty nine fish who appear to have been swimming together in tight formation at the instant of death. Appear being the important word here, since one has to work pretty hard to think of how school of fish swimming together happened to be fossilized midstwin. It's a bit puzzling, as creators don't typically just stop what they're doing long enough to be preserved in limestone. So is this a case of seeing what happened or seeing what we want to have happened. Researchers are puzzling over explanations. They have not come up with one that satisfies them all. In fact, most theories sound a bit you're gonna love it. Fishing brings to mind all that recent hubbub over the paleontologist Robert de Palma is sort of swashbuckling adventure type who claims to have found paleontological evidence of animals and that and a whole lot of fish who are actually killed by the meteor crash near the Yucatan Peninsula, which is widely considered to have ended the era of the dinosaurs and ushered in the era of the mammals about sixty five million years ago. His interpretation of his findings is deeply controversial, and discussion of this controversy has brought up discussions of older controversies that DiPalma was involved in prior to his latest shocker. One of these controversies involved Montana's own Jack Horner, easily the most famous dinosaur researcher and an inspiration for one of the characters of Jurassic Park, a film for which Horner provided technical expertise. Horner really liked to push this idea of his that tyrannosaurs rex, rather than being some fearsome predator, was a strict scavenger who just ate dead stuff he found laying around. His thinking was based largely around physiological characteristics, including exceptionally large nasal passages, which might have been necessary for the t rex to smell rotten dead critters off in the dis stunts. What burst Horner's bubble on this is the anthropologist to Palma, the meteor strike evidence guy found a vertebrae from a had resaur that had actually healed around busted t rex tooth, meaning the t rex was out hunting live dinosaurs, not carrying, and snapped off his tooth in the had resaur tail, and then the had resaur got away, Confronted with this evidence and trying desperately to hang on to a now questionable opinion or theory. Horner retorted that maybe the had resaur was sleeping and the t rex just thought it was dead. Yeah. Maybe. Now I'm gonna ease us into politics in the best possible way by talking about wilderness. We have two point three billion acres of land in the United States. Six hundred forty million of those acres, or public hundred and eleven million of those public acres are managed under a wilderness designation. Wilderness meaning tip quickly that the area has been primarily affected by the forces of nature. Man's work, is largely unnoticeable and has outstanding opportunities for solitude or primitive and unconfined type of recreation. I am paraphrasing here, but a good piece of shorthand would be that wilderness with the capital W as in designated wilderness is a place where motors and wheels are not allowed. For some perspective on my personal biases here, I'll mention that I grew up on the border of the Rattlesnake Wilderness area, located about four miles from Missoula, Montana. The Rattlesnake Wilderness is roughly thirty four thousand, three four acres and was designated as a wilderness area by Congress. In had no means of transportation other than foot or bicycle at the time, but I fished, hunted, built forts through rocks, swam, and haiked all over that wilderness. I would often bike up to the wilderness boundary sign cross Rattlesnake Creek and Pestor Trout and backwater. There. I went on to expand my wilderness travels. Once I got a vehicle. I would load up my three Chevy Celebrity and had for Bob Marshall and Conda Pantler or Lee Metcalf wilderness areas to do basically the exact same activities with more overnight camping involved that took place during my you know, backyard wilderness adventures in the Rattlesnake. The Chevy celeb was a two wheel drive, zero clearance sedan. By the way, I bring all this up because I think it's important to highlight the fact that wilderness areas are there for me to access, and they're there for you to access, and there are a lot of ways to get in there and a lot of things to do. Once you do. You can float, height, hunt, fish, right horses, sitting the damn parking lot, do nothing, or just lay around reading a book. The wilderness is what you yourself make it. You know, due to the unrefined nature of wilderness, it's a sort of beautiful blank slate for us to imagine and define ourselves on without allowing ourselves to defile the land and to find it permanently in a way that would hinder the imagining and defining of future generations. But right now, Senator Mike Lee of Utah as a bill that would go against the letter and intent of the Wilderness Act, which was passed in ninety four by a bipartisan coalition of politicians who voted to one in favor of passage in the Senate, the one dissenting voice feeling that the protections didn't go far enough. But Lee's bill would begin to unravel those protections by allowing human powered mechanized travel in wilderness areas, or, in the words of the proposed legislation quote, this bill would enrich americans enjoyment of the outdoors by expanding recreational opportunities in wilderness areas. Guess what, America, if you can't see how rich the outdoors are as is or how expansive are recreational opportunities are as is. I don't think that peddling a bye is really going to do it for you either. And by the way, it's important to keep in mind that you can have your cake and eat it too. If pedal power is your preferred method aboutdoor wreck, you already have a potential five nine million acres of public land to write on, plus well over a million miles of publicly open dirt roads to enjoy, and well over four million miles of paved roads. If that's more your style. Point being, we aren't going to run out of surfaces where bicycle traffic is allowed, but we're really pretty damn light on surfaces where it isn't. Less than two of the lower forty eight is federally designated wilderness. Let's ease up on it, folks. It's doing good as is. So this is your call to action. Email, write a letter, Call your duly elected officials and let them know that you value wild places. It doesn't matter if it's just the idea of wilderness that you value, or act old time in the wilderness that you value. Speak up. Tell them to look out for the human powered travel in wilderness areas act and give it the boot, the no go. Do it for those within the womb of time, as Teddy Roosevelt so beautifully described, the future generations of Americans who are set to enjoy and hopefully love our wildlife and wild places. If you don't, they could melt away like a snow bank on a hot summer day. That phrase is from Bob Marshall himself. Thanks for listening to Cal's we Can review. Remember to subscribe and leave me a review if you want more. In addition, if you're looking for way more fun facts and interesting tidbits, check out the meat eater dot com. If you have any comments or questions, be sure to give them to me by email at ask Cal at the meat eater dot com. That's a s K C A L at the meat eater dot com. 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